Are staff performance targets creating problems for customer experience?

In a recent conversation, a friend who works at an inbound call centre was telling me that the team must process a certain number of calls per hour. This is how they were judged on their performance. 

Someone had worked out that:

• Team member A takes the call.
• Says he needs to transfer to a colleague (this takes 20 seconds)
• Team member B processes the call in the normal manner.

Using this method it appears to the monitoring software that two calls have been processed but total time taken is a little over the time for one call.

They then swap round so Team member B transfers a call to Team member A etc.

It results in their average time per call is always within limits, even though they are not processing the number of customers their managers think they are.

What about Customer Experience?

For the customer it means a delay and not having the team member paying full attention to their needs and questions. The team member is more concerned in hitting their performance target numbers not helping the customer and giving them a good customer experience.

Question Time

Thinking back a few years, the subject of booking with your GP was brought up with the then prime minister Tony Blair on BBC Question Time. He had introduced a 24 hour target for getting an appointment to see your GP.  It came as a surprise to him, when a member of the audience said “To avoid missing the target, receptionists would tell callers that they had to phone on the day they wanted to see the doctor even if they just wanted to book an appointment the following week”.

It makes you wonder if there are internal performance targets in organisations that are gamed by the employees to get good records whist inadvertently damaging customer experience?

Do you have any examples of Targets damaging Customer Experience?

Are you inadvertently creating poor customer experience by imposing targets on your staff?